Spaghetti Detective: Monitor Your 3D Printer with Machine Learning

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Into 3D printing world, “spaghetti” is the common term for the tangled mess of stringy plastic that’s often the result of a failed print. Fear of their print bed turning into a hot plate of PLA spaghetti is enough to keep many users from leaving their machines operating overnight or while they’re out of the house.

The Spaghetti Detective, an open source project that lets machine learning take over when you can’t sit watching the printer all day, might help those users to overcome that fear. This software monitors your prints for you, and notify you if it detects a possible print failure.

The Spaghetti Detective is a plugin for OctoPrint, which runs on a Raspberry Pi, and gives you the ability to remotely control your 3D printer and view a live video feed as it runs. The plugin uses a deep learning artificial intelligence model to automatically detect print failures, and will pause the job for you so that you can check to see if it needs to be canceled.

Though the documentation notes that the lowly Raspberry Pi doesn’t have quite what it takes to handle the image recognition routines, so you’ll need a proper computer to run a server that actually handles the AI processing. The OctoPrint video feed will be sent to that server so it can be analyzed, and then the server communicates back if a problem is detected.

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